170 thoughts on “Weekly Open Thread 2.0”

  1. doing a Repub gerrymander of North Carolina, it seems like a good thing to start with. Any general advice in terms of the gerrymander? (And McCain 55 percent is relatively Safe R, right?)

  2. Any Corpus Christi resident on SSP to explain what the heck is going on there? Huge Hispanic majority, longtime Rep. loses to total dude from the street, Dems lose 2 state Reps., a bunch of Dem judges lose (only Dem wins DA, but that’s a different story), are TX Latinos becoming GOPers by default? This wasn’t only about turnout. Hispanic Majority TX-23 is much easier to understand. Who would have believed that the GOP would pick up 2 TX VRA districts.  

  3. I’m trying to make some maps with Dave’s redistricting app but the states won’t load. The page opens but nothing happens when I select a state. I know it has to download data from somewhere but nothing happens after even 5 minutes. I have Searchlight and my internet isn’t slow at all. Any advice? Thanks.

  4. I know this is a few weeks old but I’d just read about it a few days ago. Loretta Sanchez gave Van Tran a huge opportunity with her dumb comment, and this is what his campaign came up with?

    http://www.google.com/hostedne…

    Between that and having Palin come to the district, he must have wanted to lose.

  5. Hey,

    Where can I find a list of all the federal-incumbents who lost in this election? I know some races are still being decided, but finding a tally with the latest info has been harder to find than I thought. Maybe SSP labs can do something?

  6. Both he and I get to gloat now. 😉

    And of course, so does mi abuelito. He’s been preparing for this for a LONG time…

    Reid knew he would be targeted the moment he took over for Tom Daschle after the 2004 election. He couldn’t have foretold just how high his negatives would go or just how low the economy would sink. But the goal was to be prepared – for anything.

    Step one: Turn Nevada from a slightly red state to a solidly blue one.

    The change came as Reid, ever the back-room player and always looking ahead and for himself, maneuvered for Nevada to get an early presidential caucus for the ’08 cycle and the machine started cranking in ’07. Reid publicly challenged his chief political operative, Rebecca Lambe, imported from Missouri, to turn out 100,000 people for the caucuses. I scoffed, as did many others. About 117,000 Democrats showed up.

    The rest of that cycle for Team Preparation was dedicated to eliminating possible opponents – they targeted state Sens. Joe Heck and Bob Beers, along with Rep. Jon Porter. All lost.

    Even after the cyclical voter registration purge, Democrats maintained a 60,000-vote edge going into 2010, and the Reid folks believed they would need that to offset the GOP turnout advantage and the much-hyped enthusiasm gap.

    In 2009, the team dedicated itself to one goal – raising enough money to scare off Rep. Dean Heller or Porter, considered their most formidable opponents. June 16, 2009, helped – the day Sen. John Ensign cast a pall over the Nevada GOP with his stunning revelation of an affair, which left him crippled and Heller frozen in place, perhaps seeing an easier path to a Senate seat in 2012 or if Ensign resigned. Porter received a cushy offer from a lobbying firm; Reid’s letter of recommendation will never be found.

    On a parallel track, Team Reid was preparing all the research it might need for various opponents, and hiring staff to assist in research and field and creating a synergistic mix of longtime Nevada operatives and newcomers (as opposed to the toxic combination of local Angle sycophants and the political pros Angle was importuned to hire). Reid essentially assimilated the state Democratic Party, which became a formidable force (again, as opposed to the hollow shell known as the state GOP).

    […]

    With the team assembled, the campaign began to prepare at the beginning of 2010 to face Sue Lowden, the deep-pocketed, telegenic former anchorwoman and state senator. She was the person, as one insider put it via e-mail, “we were least interested in facing so we set out to make sure that she either 1) came out of the primary bruised and battered or 2) didn’t come out of the primary at all so we would face Sharron Angle or Danny Tarkanian.”

    With the help of Patriot Majority, a third-party group run by former Reid spokesman Craig Varoga that began pounding Lowden on TV on April 30, the Democratic effort to drive up the likely GOP nominee’s negatives did not abate. It is a myth that Reid, as many have opined, simply “picked” his opponent – Lowden turned out to be a paper candidate who made the gaffe of the year (chickens for health care) and Angle was indomitable and boosted by out-of-state funds from the Tea Party Express and the Club for Growth.

    (One other preparation note: Democrats had lobbied for the primary to be moved back to June from August, thus giving Reid more time to pound whoever won and Republicans less time to rally behind one person. Thus, a dozen candidates caused the entropy that helped Angle emerge.)

    As Republicans raised each other’s negatives, the Reid folks weren’t napping. They were hiring more staff, honing the turnout model that would prove the only accurate one this cycle (kudos to pollster Mark Mellman) and targeting Hispanics. “We knew that increasing the share of the electorate who were Hispanic was a key to winning so we invested heavily and ran an aggressive Hispanic program,” a Reid operative told me.

    When Angle won on June 8, her campaign had a dilemma – to let Sharron be Sharron or to try to change/massage, deny previous positions. The hybrid solution did not help her and the Reid rapid response team was faster than a speeding news release. The same Democratic Party tracker who caught Lowden in her chickens gaffe followed Angle around and picked up new gems. Others listened to – and called in to – radio programs Angle was on.

    In the end, Team Angle didn’t know what hit it. Despite the internal tension between the local yokels and the political pros, despite a campaign manager (Terry Campbell) who chose elective knee surgery during the middle of the biggest race in the country and despite having a thrown-together get-out-the-vote operation, they thought they were crushing Reid among independents. They thought they had the race won, as one insider informed me after I predicted Reid would win the Sunday before the balloting. They believed the public polls that drove the “Angle will win” narrative; they believed their own surveys.

    They had no idea.

  8. what the new congressional maps look like? It is kind of hard to speculate  about which races might be competitive if we don’t know what is what.

    I just hope that whomever takes over the DCCC is ready to pounce the moment this stuff is announced.

  9. So what is the likelihood that Snowe gets a primary next election? Who would run for the R side? Would they stand a good chance of wining? Does Snowe go indy or even D? Who runs for our side? Michaud? Pingree? Culter? Stephen King? I’m in a Maine type of mood.  

  10. Assuming Costa holds on in CA-20, which looks likely, Republicans did not gain a single seat with a PVI greater than D+4.  Republicans hold only one seat with a PVI greater than D+4 – IL-10 (D+6).  

    This was really a re-alignment, with Republicans taking back all of the low hanging fruit with Republican PVI’s, and just a few swingy Dem-leaning seats.

  16. Let’s address this DailyKos front page article here.

    Here are the politicians mentioned in the article:

    Joe Sestak

    Ann McLane Kuster

    Patrick Murphy

    Tom Perriello

    Dan Maffei

    Bryan Lentz

    Scott Murphy

    John Hall

    Ami Bera

    Ron Klein

    Joe Garcia

    John Salazar

    Caroline Fayard

    Jocelyn Benson

    Vincent Sheheen

    Cary Kennedy

    Melissa Bean

    Bill Foster

    Baron Hill

    Mark Schauer

    Stephanie Herseth Sandlin

    Which of these folks do you want to run for office again? Which would you like to can it? I know some of them have been discussed before. I will offer the general comment that it is really difficult to know whether newcomers or people trying to get their seats back are likely to do better in 2012. We simply have no way to know what the political climate will be like then.

  17. Said one Manchin adviser: “He was elected as a Democrat and he has to go to Washington as a Democrat to try, in good faith, to make the changes in the party he campaigned on. Now, if that doesn’t work and Democrats aren’t receptive, I don’t know what possibilities that leaves open.”

    http://politicalwire.com/archi…

    No word on whether one of the changes he wants is having Democrats shoot at legislation he doesn’t like.

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